I got the renewal reminder for phx.tools: another $33.39 to keep the domain for a year. No one’s using the website, so I’m shutting it down and won’t be renewing the domain when it expires on 5 December.
Back in 2023, inspired by rails.new, I wanted the Elixir community to have a quick-start command too. It seemed like a good project for our internship program, so several interns worked on it together with me. We built a landing page and an installation script to set up an Elixir and Phoenix development environment on Linux and macOS. I wrote about it in the original phx.tools introduction.
Pushing to GitHub triggered a workflow that tested the whole installation process on Linux and macOS, each under Bash, Zsh and Fish. The checks went through the installer, generated a Phoenix application and started its server to verify that it responded to an HTTP request.
If you’re starting a Phoenix application today, Phoenix Express covers that setup on macOS and Ubuntu:
curl https://new.phoenixframework.org/myapp | sh
It installs Erlang, Elixir and Phoenix and generates an application called myapp. Change that part of the URL to choose your application’s name. It uses PostgreSQL or MySQL if available, otherwise SQLite. For other operating systems, follow the Phoenix installation guide.
The phx.tools source remains available as a public archive under its existing MIT license. The website and hosted installer have been shut down, and the project won’t receive further updates.